Tillack setback... again

08 December 2007

The likelihood is receding that OLAF, the EU's bungling anti-fraud arm, will ever face serious questions about its role in the hounding of journalist Hans-Martin Tillack, writes Stephen Gardner. This is despite last week's European Court of Human Rights ruling that Belgian police were wrong in 2002 to detain the German reporter and confiscate his files, following wholly unsubstantiated allegations of bribery made by OLAF. More light could have been shed by the European Parliament, which was asked in 2005 to look into an EU Ombudsman finding that OLAF provided misleading statements about the Tillack case. A few days before the Court of Human Rights judgement, however, the Parliament quietly dropped its inquiry. The decision to not look into OLAF was taken by the Parliament's Conference of Presidents – a pompous name for political group leaders, who have the power to give special Parliament reports the green light. A spokesman was unable to say why the investigation was quashed, but did say that the proposed OLAF report was one of a batch of ten special reports considered by the Conference – and was the only one not given the go ahead. A version of this article was originally published in Private Eye. See the previous article on Eurocorrespondent.com about the Tillack case.

 

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